Serverless Streaming: The Best of Both Worlds

Okay, you've created your masterpiece, and you want to publish it to the Web so your Aunt Gertie in Tallahassee can watch it. You're thinking about creating a streaming media file, so she can watch it without having to wait for a download. But streaming media doesn't have great quality, especially on slower connections, and publishing streaming media means finding a host with a streaming media server.
If you create a downloadable media file, you could make it as high quality as you want, but the file could end up being huge. That means a long download time for poor Aunt Gertie, not to mention a long upload time for you.

The Serverless Alternative

There is another alternative, one that walks the middle ground between streaming and downloading, yet is clearly very different from them both. Serverless streaming has been around a while, taking a little time to get up to speed, with the notable exception of VivoActive, from the now deceased Vivo Software. Real Networks bought Vivo in 1998, and allowed it to die, some believe because Real recognized it as being serious competition.
After the untimely demise of Vivo, we didn't see much in the way of serverless streaming until the release of QuickTime 4. When Apple released the last version of QuickTime, they included the ability for quick viewing, which means viewing while the QuickTime file continues to download. Version 5 is in its second public beta release at press time and should be in its final release by the time you read this.
QuickTime's primary drawback is the old slow connection problem. If you're on a slow connection, then your computer cannot download the file as fast as you can view it. So you end up trying to watch the file a frame at a time, as it arrives, which can be an extremely frustrating experience.

High Speed and Quality, Too

Wouldn't it be cool if you could create a single, high-quality file that Aunt Gertie could watch over her 28.8Kbps connection, while your brother Charlie, with a T-1 (1.5Mbps), would see the same file with much better quality. Better yet, wouldn't it be really neat if Aunt Gertie could not only view the low-res version that her connection speed demands, but that the full, high-quality file would download while she browsed the Internet? Then she could watch the high-quality version after it downloaded, having seen the low-res version immediately, as a serverless stream - really the best of both worlds.
This wish list may seem fantastic, but it is already a reality, with Indeo 5 and, to some extent, QuickTime 5. The Ligos Corporation, which has acquired licenses to develop and distribute Indeo video and audio codecs from Intel, is brewing a revolution in media delivery. While the rest of us have been sweating over multiple streaming files (one for 28.8, another for 56.6, yet another for ISDN, maybe a couple of others still for broadband connections) or boring our friends and relatives to death with huge download files, Ligos has been building the medium for anybody to use anytime for anything.
With Indeo 5, when you encode your video, you choose multiple layers, each with a different frame rate, resolution and even color depth. Then, as your viewers download, they receive the layer with the highest quality that "fits" in their respective connections. If their connection speed does not allow the best quality that your file has to offer, they can relax, because after they view their "stepped-down" version, the remainder of the file will continue to download. Then they can watch your video with just as high quality as someone with a very high-speed connection.

How it Work…